I. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of generating a demand plan for a configurable product in a managed supply chain using a computer and a computer system for generating a demand plan for a configurable product in a managed supply chain.
II. Background Information
Demand planning is used to forecast the demand for products. One object of demand planning is to plan the demand of products with respect to other product independent characteristics, for example, sales regions, customer channel and location etc. Another object of demand planning and characteristics based forecasting (CBF) is to plan the demand of complex products and their components. This is done by introducing product dependent characteristics for the complex products. An example of a complex product is a computer for which the characteristics computer memory, configuration, hard disc etc, are defined. A complex product is a product having at least one product dependent characteristic, for example, computer memory, configuration, hard disc etc.
Demand planning applications are typically provided on a computer system. Typically, they form a component or module of a supply chain management application, which runs on a computer.
Conventionally, a supply chain management application comprises a number of applications including the demand planning application and a product planning application. Demand planning involves only the planning with respect to characteristics, that is one characteristic for the complex product—or more specifically—the configurable product. A configurable product is a product, for example a personal computer (PC), of which different variants are available. Production planning, on the other hand, involves planning with respect to “real” characteristics, such as product and location.
Conventionally, in order to calculate the materials necessary to make the configurable product the bill of materials (BOM) for the configurable product is required and the BOM has to be exploded in the production planning application. One drawback of this first conventional approach is that it requires the creation and maintenance of the bill of material and its explosion in different software components. Thus, it is not possible to plan assembled components directly. In conventional applications, the assembled finished product is planned using CBF and after the creation of the demand plan is finished, the result is released from the Demand Planning component of the application to the Production Planning component of the application. In the Production Planning component, the bill of material is exploded so that the dependent demand for all the components can be calculated. The results for the assembled components then have to be released back from the Production planning component to the Demand planning component. It is further necessary to define the assembled components in the Demand Planning as independent assembled products with their own profile. The back release from the Production Planning then allows the planning of the assembled components with respect to their components to be continued. This procedure of release and back release has to be executed for each assembled product and sequentially for each level of the bill of materials hierarchy. The release and back release between two different planning components of the supply chain management application together with the bill of materials explosion is a time consuming and requires cumbersome processing by the processing device in the computer. The direct relation of the components of an assembled component to the assembled finished product is further lost because the back release aggregates the dependent demand for the assembled components. Using current prior art supply chain management applications, such as the Advance Planner and Optimizer (APO) available from SAP AG, the consistent aggregation calculation is not shown and therefore, the maintenance of a demand plan is less flexible. Further, it is not in real time and, may further possible require the definition of many new objects outside the demand planning component. This compromises the user's ease with which he can obtain a demand plan using the application. It further limits the value of the information available to a user in the demand plan.
Further, the logistic chain of products between a supplier and end user of the products is compromised. Further, the supply of goods is compromised. The present invention addresses the problems of improving the logistic chain of products between a supplier and an end user of the products. It is a further object to optimize the logistic chain with the purpose of keepings costs, including the cost of the products, down. It is a yet a further object to make the supply of products more efficient. Thus, the process is difficult to implement and support. Further, this approach when implemented has drawbacks for the user because it is slow and provides limited information to the planner.
A further conventional approach is a technique called characteristics based forecasting (CBF), in which characteristics are used in order to describe the components on the product level.
One drawback of existing characteristics based forecasting is that its functionality does not allow assembled components to be modelled. Assembled components are components of the configurable product which themselves are assembled from other components. Thus, conventional CBF is not suitable for replacing a general bill of materials wherein assembled components can also be modelled.
The problems with conventional approaches compromise the accuracy of the demand planning and the ease with which the user can use the system. In particular, it is an object of the present invention to improve the speed with which the demand plan can be generated. It is a further object to improve the accuracy with which the supply of a product in the supply chain can be controlled.